"You're badly hurt, Frederickson. Very badly hurt."
Time had run out. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Raskolnikov standing beside me, his arms wrapped around the girder on which I was leaning. There was almost a trace of sympathy in the other man's voice-sympathy and chagrin at being held up for so long by a man who couldn't even stand.
He braced himself with his legs and placed his hands on my shoulders, pushing me forward and to the side. My arms and legs were now hanging limp and useless. I could see my blood flowing out onto the girder, dripping down into the darkness.
"My brother knows," I whispered hoarsely. "We've been talking about this for days. He'll make the same connections and backtrack along the circus route. The ring is smashed."
"No," Raskolnikov said. "There was no time. I'm sorry, Frederickson. I truly am. You are a very brave man."
I didn't find the sincerity in his voice any comfort. It was almost over now, and I vaguely wondered whether or not I would faint before I hit the sharp wooden and steel angles of the seats below.
Then Garth's shot caught Raskolnikov in the throat. It was a good shot, considering the fact that Garth had a bad angle leaning into a half-opened window and was firing into the shadows.
Raskolnikov gargled on his way down. There was the ugly sound of a body breaking on the seats, screams, then silence. I could see Garth in front of me, struggling to get his body through the window.
Good show; but considering the fact that I was already most of the way off the girder, I didn't think he was going to get to me in time.
It was the first time I'd been wrong all day.
Rage
Slow day; anathema to a criminology professor moonlighting as a private detective. I had a graduate seminar to teach later in the afternoon, but my lecture was prepared and I was in my downtown office, staring out my second-floor window, hoping for some business to blow in off the street. I had to settle for my brother.
Someone else was driving the unmarked car, but it was Garth-all normal six feet two inches of him-who got out on the passenger's side, then walked stiffly across the sidewalk and into the building. I ran my finger over a water spot on the glass. It wasn't unusual for Garth to drop by for coffee when he was in the neighborhood, but this time there had seemed a tension-an urgency-in the way he moved that was incongruous. I went out by the elevator to meet him.
The elevator doors sighed open-Garth's face was ashen, his eyes two open wounds. He pushed past a young couple, glanced once in my direction, then rushed into my office. I went after him, closing the door behind me. He had already stripped off his jacket, and the black leather straps of his shoulder holster stood out like paint stains on the starched white of his shirt. He took the gun from its holster and slid it across my desk. "Find a drawer for that, will you, brother?" Garth's teeth were clenched tightly together and the voice behind them trembled.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Put it away! " Now Garth's voice boomed. His fists slammed down on the plastic surface of the desk top. A stack of books on the corner teetered and fell to the floor.
Angry men and guns make a bad mix. As a cop, Garth knew that better than anyone. I walked quickly around to the other side of the desk, opened a drawer and dropped the gun into it.
Garth sat down hard in a straight-backed wooden chair. He planted his feet flat on the floor and gripped the edges of the seat. Instantly the flesh around his knuckles went white. His head was bent forward and I couldn't see his face, but the flesh of his neck was a fiery red, gorged with blood. I could see his pulse, framed by muscle cords that looked like steel rods implanted just below the skin.
I spoke very quietly. "You want to talk, brother?"
Garth, in some soundproofed prison of rage, couldn't hear me. He suddenly sprang to his feet, grabbed the chair and flung it across the room, snapping a pole lamp in two and mining an ugly hole in the plaster wall. The shattered pieces fell to the floor; instant junk. In the same motion Garth spun around and with one sweep of his hand cleared the top of my desk. A heavy glass ashtray made another hole in the wall about a foot too low to be a perfect match for the other. Considering the fact that my office wasn't that large to begin with, I estimated that a complete renovation was going to take about three more minutes. I walked up to Garth and grabbed his arm. That was a mistake.
Now, I have a black belt, second Dan, in karate, and am reasonably proficient in a number of the other lesser-known martial arts; when you're a four-foot-eight-inch dwarf you develop a predilection for such things. Still, a man my size must rely on anticipation, leverage and angles, factors that don't normally spring to mind when you're merely trying to calm down your brother. Consequently, I found myself standing on my toes, Garth's hands wrapped around my neck. The whites of his eyes were marbled with red, while the dilated pupils opened up and stared at nothing, like black circles painted on canvas by a bad artist.
I knew I had only a few seconds to act. At the least, I could very well end up with a cracked larynx; at worst, there was the very real possibility I was going to end up as one dead dwarf, killed by my own brother. I didn't like the options.
I was floating in an airless void, Garth's features spinning before my eyes. I extended my arms, then drove my thumbs into the small of his back, just above the kidneys. That didn't do much except make him blink. I smashed my stiffened fingers up into the nerve clusters in his armpits. The animal that Garth had become grunted; his grip loosened, but it was nothing to cheer about; I still couldn't breathe. Finally I raised one hand up between his arms and poked at his larynx. Garth gasped and his hands came loose. I collapsed to my knees, my lungs sobbing for air. I managed to reach the shattered chair at the opposite end of the room. I grabbed one of the broken chair legs and spun around, prepared to bounce the splintered wood off my brother's skull. It wasn't necessary. Garth was leaning against my desk, staring uncomprehendingly at his hands. His face had changed color like a traffic light, from a brilliant crimson to a sickly yellow-white. His gaze slowly shifted to where I was poised like a statue, my improvised club raised in the air.
"Mongo. ." Garth's voice was a muffled whisper of pain.
"I hope you feel better," I said, trying to sound sardonic. It didn't come out that way. It was hard for me to sound sardonic with a bruised voice box that felt as if it had been pushed back somewhere in the vicinity of my spinal column.
Garth's lips moved, but no sound came out. He was across the room in four quick strides, trying to lift me up in his arms. Enough is enough-I pushed him away with the chair leg. I was building up a little anger of my own, but it vanished as the door suddenly opened. The man who stepped into the room was of medium height, with close-cropped, warm-yellow hair that tended to clash with his cold gray eyes. I wondered if he dyed his hair.
Garth glanced at the man, then quickly turned back to me. His face was a pleading exclamation mark as he shook his head. The movement was almost imperceptible, but I thought I'd received the message.
"Who the hell are you?" I said to the man in the doorway.
Oddly enough, my voice sounded quite normal, with just the right seasoning of surprise. It hurt only when I swallowed.
"Name's Boise," the man said, surveying the damage. "I came looking for my partner here. Saw your name on the directory down in the lobby. Didn't know Garth had a brother."